The Jam released their eighth single, “When You’re Young,” in August of 1979. Written and recorded a few months after Paul Weller turned twenty-one, the blistering song offered a complaint, if you could catch up to it, that the massive energy with which the young are dosed wears off far too soon, colorful wildness tamed into gray dreariness.

“In the city there’s a thousand faces all shining bright,” Weller barked in the Jam’s debut single, in 1977, “And those golden faces are under 25.” Weller w...